Young inventor Palmer Luckey couldn't have got his gaming project, Rift, off the ground without $2.4m given to him via the crowdfunding website. Now his backers are angry he's sold out to the social media giant

A games player wearing a prototype Oculus Rift virtual reality headset at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January 2014. Photograph: Jae C Hong/AP

You love your local bookshop. When you and some friends met the proprietor before it opened, you were so impressed that you each donated a small amount to help him get going. As a way of saying thank you, he gave you a free book and painted your names on the wall. Word spread, and soon people were travelling long distances to visit. You feel happy and proud. You were there at the beginning, and you have helped to make something that will benefit everybody. Then you hear the news. The nice proprietor has sold it all to Amazon. He's now a billionaire. You still aren't. You feel exactly how the people who gave money to Palmer Luckey on Kickstarter now feel.

Luckey is the young Californian inventor of Oculus Rift, a new type of virtual reality goggles. The headsets are not available to consumers yet, but more or less everyone who tries them says the same thing: "Wooah!", or words to that effect. In the summer of 2012, during early development, Luckey appealed for donations on Kickstarter, a crowdfunding website that raises money for new projects that people want to see realised.

When the appeal closed, 9,522 people had put in a total of $2,437,429 (about £1.5m), almost 10 times the amount that Luckey asked for. According to the size of their contribution, donors received anything from a thank you note to their own prototype. On Tuesday it was announced that Oculus was being sold to Facebook for $2bn. "I'm passionate about bringing games to the next level," Luckey told prospective investors in his original Kickstarter video. It perhaps went without saying that, on the whole, people are also passionate about sipping Krug in a swimming pool full of money.

"This is about the best possible outcome for the future of virtual reality, not my wallet," Luckey told his outraged supporters on Reddit, and there are some reasons to believe him. He says, for instance, that the Rift will now be much cheaper and better when it comes out. He promises that "you will not need a Facebook account to use or develop … the Rift", and that Oculus the company won't change."If anything," he says, "our hardware and software will get even more open, and Facebook is onboard with that … The partnership … means a better Oculus Rift with fewer compromises even faster than we anticipated."

Others argue that letting Mark Zuckerberg do what he likes with the technology before it even launches would not be a partnership at all. Many express concern about Facebook's record, which they see as intrusive and splattered with advertising. Some come to the conclusion that Luckey, who is still just 21, has been terribly naive. This, however, is very much the mild end of the comments.

"You selling out to Facebook is a disgrace," says Sergey Chubukov on Kickstarter. "It damages not only your reputation, but the whole of crowdfunding. I cannot put into words how betrayed I feel by this." "Fuck you, Palmer," says deletemeapril162014 on Reddit. "The community brought you here, and your disingenuous posts are fucking insulting." "Fuck everything about this," balathustrius says. And there are hundreds more. Luckey promises good news that will win everybody round within a year. He will still be rich, of course, whether it does or not.